Funding success for Southampton City Council’s Strategic Planning team

We are pleased to share that we have been successful in securing funding from the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, to continue improving our digital planning practices

Since the Proptech Innovation Fund was first launched in August 2021, Southampton City Council is the only Local Authority to have been successful on all rounds of funding. The council has now jointly secured funding through Round Four to work with The City of London Corporation on further PropTech (Property Technology) improvements which aim to enhance community engagement and deliver a more modern and efficient planning system.

Since 2021 this funding has provided the Strategic Planning Team with a digital consultation platform which was used for the formal Local Plan consultation that took place from October 2022 to January 2023 and to publish the consultation results. We have also worked with the supplier to further develop the platform and have created a consultation response dashboard with search, filter and export functions allowing the public to view the full details of the consultation responses in any way they wish.

We wanted to further improve our consultation process and to make it easier for people to visualise what proposals might look like in different parts of the city, something that could be achieved with a 3D digital model. The funding allowed us to have the city centre and town and district centres across the city modelled, these were prioritised as they are the areas where most development is proposed. This has unlocked the ability for planners, developers and architects to all work on plans in one 3D space.

However, we also wanted the public to have the benefit of this technology. Most recently, we have developed a web version of the 3D map using the existing detailed model of the city (created with Round Two funding). We are currently testing this new product and aim to use this in the next consultation on the Local Plan. If you would like to have a first look at the 3D webmap and help us test it and give feedback, please get in touch at local.plan@southampton.gov.uk.

The latest funding has been jointly awarded to Southampton City Council and the City of London Corporation. Our partnership has grown through working on PropTech and we have similar aspirations to use 3D maps of our cities to publish our Local Plans and, ideally, enable people to interact with the map and comment on proposals. We hope that this will help people to better understand proposals in context of the place and surroundings, whilst also making use of information about things like environmental considerations. Working with the City of London Corporation will allow us to share skills and knowledge and achieve more than we could have done working alone.

We are working with VU.City on the 3D Model and Konveio who will help develop the means to collect and record comments digitally. We also continue to use Bang the Table, our digital consultation platform from Granicus.

Councillor Sarah Bogle, Cabinet Member for Economic Development, said:

“The award of funding in Round Four of the PropTech project is a fantastic expression of confidence in not only our work to date but the ideas we are seeking to develop on making planning more digitally accessible. The partnerships we’ve been able to build with other local authorities and the private sector have been invaluable and we are keen to hear what people think about the new consultation dashboard and the 3D model of the city to help us to improve these programmes.”